I have personally been trying to get default prettifiers assigned to the tensorflow, keras, tensorboard, and julia tags in Stack Overflow for---in some cases---over two years now, and the discussions in each case have stagnated and gone nowhere. Going to SO and seeing these languages with no highlighting seems to imply that SO is unable to change with the times; an impression I do not think the communit at large wishes to convey.

I propose that the current process for getting new prettifiers assigned to "new" languages is broken. I submit as evidence the following two discussion that I started.

Get more upvotes without incurring more downvotes. If you can't convince the community you won't get anything to change. Breaking up the proposals into invdividual suggestions per tag might help.
– Robert LongsonJul 25 '19 at 17:47

Is there a chatroom for Julia users? If so, get them to vote and/or chime in. I personally see not much harm in adding lang-default to the tag because if it turns out to be terrible it is easy to remove
– reneJul 25 '19 at 17:51

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I dropped a message in Trogdor as that room is occupied with tag related meta posts but the two example questions are not in the worksheet we use.
– reneJul 25 '19 at 17:59

I just don’t see the consensus on that proposal. I do monitor such requests and when there is community consensus the change is easily made. What is lacking here is not a different process but community support for your specific proposal.
– Martijn Pieters♦Jul 25 '19 at 20:25

@MartijnPieters I'm not sure if voting is the best indicator there? Shog9 said something about that in the context of burnination but I think it applies here as well. I don't expect most people even know what syntax-highlighting is and how it works.
– reneJul 25 '19 at 20:37

@MartijnPieters I see your point, but most people don't contribute to meta, most people don't know how that system works (I didn't until I started bugging you all about it for two years), Julia is a small community, and it seems to me like a self-evident truth that some syntax highlighting is better than no syntax highlighting. This should be something that can be set when a language tag is first created. The only constraint should be that it does not impede readability, which it rarely does and in these cases does not.
– EngineeroJul 25 '19 at 21:30

@MartijnPieters now that I think about it, why isn't a default highligher assigned and save the meta discussions for fixing when it is causing issues? It should be pretty easy to point out cases where such-and-such prettifier breaks readability. Set something up and prove by counterexample that it doesn't work.
– EngineeroJul 25 '19 at 21:35

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I've gone ahead and implemented those two requests. I'm not aware of any formal process; it appears the requests were forgotten about and didn't gain much traction. Anyway, I don't see much harm in adding default syntax highlighting so long as the request isn't way off base. Some highlighting is better than a grey blob in almost all cases. If it does cause major problems, we'll be sure to hear about it on meta, and it only takes a second to revert it. For edge cases, people can always manually specify the highlighting needed for each snippet.
– Rob♦Jul 26 '19 at 4:04

1 Answer
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Let's not over complicate things. There is no need to have an extensive process like we have for burninations, which are hard to undo. Not so for syntax highlighting. It is an effortless moderator only setting on the Tag page. And if it turns out to be wrong the setting is as easily removed.

I would also argue that having an extended meta discussion over the correct syntax highlighting and expect or wait for (enough) community support is futile, specially if voting is our only mechanism.

With that out of the way, going forward let's do "the process" as follows:

State how you are involved in that tag. Don't request syntax highlighting for a tag you just stumbled upon or where you were just looking for something to post on meta

In your post offer one of the current supported syntax-highlighters (or explain why removal is needed)

In your post in case of adding a prettifier explain why an existing tag with syntax-highlighting will not work

if it is common that questions with tag api are also tagged with java or python, the api doesn't need an syntax-highlighter. Adding one might even hurt correct highlighting.

If you request to add lang-default ( the generic, catch all, best effort prettifier) explain why that is better then a more specific syntax-highlighter or leave it to the OP's to use markdown to force a specific syntax highlighter.

After posting wait for 6 to 8 days to have it gather views and votes and other feedback.

If no serious doubts have been raised a mod will handle the support request by updating the tag with the syntax-highlighter that was suggested

If it is not handled after another 6 to 8 days (so 12 to 16 days after the post was created) raise a mod flag to ask the mod team to handle the request. If the moderator declines the flag it is preferred they post an answer why the request will not be handled, with a status-declined added to the question.

At the day of posting, there is a backlog of 61 questions that might need to be looked at and handled.